3 reasons your brand should have a face on Instagram

Deciding how to present yourself and your business on social media can be a challenge.

However, when you strike a balance between personal and professional, it builds trust with your audience and offers a greater chance of turning them into customers.

In this video you’ll learn:

The importance of human connection when building a following on Instagram
The benefits to being the face of your own business
How to use the principles of influencer marketing for your own brand

Hi there. I'm Katie Steckly a social media marketing educator and the owner of Katie Stackley Creative Services, a content creation agency for entrepreneurs and influencers. Many small business owners are intimidated to be the face of their brand on social media. So instead they hide behind logos, product photography and generic captions. In this video, I'm going to be talking about why it's so important for your business to have a personal brand on Instagram.

Humans are programmed to recognize and connect with other people. We really are social creatures. Many small business owners struggled to build brand recognition and fret over what colors to use, what logo to use and what fonts to choose. When in my opinion, the best logo could ever have as a small business is your own face. Become familiar with your Instagram audience as a person, and your brand will become all the more memorable.

As small business owners, we can often feel like we can give ourselves more credibility by pretending that we're actually a bigger business than we are. We've all done it, written we on our about page when more accurately it would be, I. But here's the thing on Instagram, that kind of strategy actually hinders you more than it helps you. When you're open and honest with your followers on Instagram and you start sharing your face, your followers become connected with you as a person, and then they're much more likely to purchase from you because they are purchasing from a person they know, rather than an anonymous brand.

According to Business Insider, the influencer marketing industry is on track to be worth $15 billion by 2022. Instead of stressing about how you can start to work with influencers as a small business owner, just become an influencer yourself. Now it's certainly more easily said than done, but as you start to build an audience that is connected with you as a personal brand, you'll have much more influence over the purchases that that audience makes, and that can include purchases of products that you're selling.

So while most influencers spend their time recommending products created by other brands and companies, you can simply be recommending your own product. To start marketing yourself as a personal brand. You can take a few easy steps at the beginning. If your profile picture is currently your logo, think about swapping that out for a photo of you. Start to share more photos of yourself in your feed and write more personal captions.

And of course, start filming yourself on your Instagram stories. Show some behind the scenes that actually talk to your audience on stories. Don't give into imposter syndrome by believing that you can make your business seem more legit by hiding behind a depersonalized brand. Let your own personality shine through, become the face of your brand and start to build trust with your audience and drive more sales. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in my next video.

Hiding behind a logo is a thing of the past. Today, people want to know the face behind the brand. In this video you’ll learn 5 key secrets to creating visuals that make you and your brand stand out through the screen.

Start building a more personal brand with a few simple changes:

If your profile picture is your logo, think about swapping it out for a photo of you
Share more photos of yourself in the feed
Write more personal captions